US Civil War 2.0 Update

Young boy sleeps between his parents

There have been several articles in the past week or so on the topic of the possibility that there will be or there already is a second civil war occurring in the United States. Several of them reference each other.

From Richard Fernandez’s article at PJ Media, What Would a Hybrid Civil War Look Like? wonders if we are already in a civil hybrid war where victory is achieved by silencing opponents, punitive prosecution and deplatforming.

…Howard Schultz tweeted that “the failed political class of Washington, D.C., has broken America’s political system. And out of that are rising political extremes on both sides.” Yet to some, extremes are not a bug but a feature. Bernie Sanders declared without a hint of irony that “Donald Trump wants to divide us up based on the color of our skin, based on where we were born, based on our gender, our religion and our sexual orientation,” even though that is the perfect definition of intersectional identity politics.

While one explanation for the fractiousness is a reversion to our primitive natural tendency to mistrust outsiders, the other possibility is that it is now the way modern warfare is waged. The Russians have ascribed events unfolding in Venezuela to an American Trojan Horse strategy. It “would rely on ‘protest potential of the fifth column’ to destabilize the situation in the countries with unwanted governments … using the technologies of color revolutions.”

The Russians, whose Soviet empire was overthrown by the color revolutions, have been experimenting with similar strategies known as hybrid warfare. As the NYT reported

General Gerasimov laid out in an article published in 2013 … which many now see as a foreshadowing of the country’s embrace of “hybrid war”… analysts see a progression from the blend of subversion and propaganda used in Ukraine to the tactics later directed against Western nations, including the United States, where Russia’s military intelligence agency hacked into Democratic Party computers during the 2016 election.

With conventional war rendered suicidal by the advent of nuclear weapons, a cocktail of lawfare, info war, deliberate population movement, and targeted physical intimidation is now the toolset of choice and the Russians, Chinese, jihadis, EU, and USA each have their versions.

“The idea that the Russians have discovered some new art of war is wrong,” Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Royal United Services Institute and the author of “Russian Political War,” said of the general’s latest speech. “This is basically the Russians trying to grapple with the modern world.” Hybrid war has long been a Western military term of art, analysts say, especially in the context of counterterrorism.

But since the resulting battlefields are waged inside the country, there is little reason why domestic political conflict should not resemble the international ones. Because victory is now attained by jailing opponents, silencing or financially sanctioning them, punitive prosecution, deplatforming, and universal surveillance are used alike in both cases and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart. The thesis that America is already in a “civil war” or on the brink occurred to Greg Jaffe, national security reporter, and Jenna Johnson, national political correspondent for The Washington Post...

…Michael Cohen, for example, Trump’s turncoat personal lawyer who committed perjury by lying to Congress, was quoted high in the article as saying, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Now that is certainly rich. Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Washington has been consumed by the Mueller investigation, and amid mindless chatter that Trump is an illegitimate president slated for impeachment. In other words, the last thing that can be said about the Democrats is that they facilitated a “peaceful transition of power.” In fact, they have hobbled Trump and his administration ever since he entered the Oval Office.

Another pro-Liberal voice dragged into the Civil War story was Robert Reich, who served on Barack Obama’s economic transition advisory board. The Post linked to an article Reich wrote last year where he posited the fictional scenario where an impeachment resolution against the president is enacted, thus kicking off mass civil strife on the direct command of dear leader…

Now that is some world-class chutzpah. In fact, it is the same self-righteous, ingratiating tone that weaves itself throughout the Post article. In keeping with the mainstream media’s non-stop narrative, Trump and the Republicans are blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the country, while the Democrats come off as little angels trying to piece the fractured country back together.

As already mentioned, Donald Trump is certainly not above criticism. Far from it. But for the mainstream media to place all of the blame for the current political malaise at the Republican’s door is about as responsible as lighting up a cigarette inside of a Chinese fireworks factory…

Finally Malcolm Pollack’s On Civil War discusses how it is the Left that has pulled crazily away from the rest of the country and the resulting desperation of normal people to return to civilized order that is causing the chasm.

…That’s it exactly: we are desperate. We know how close we are to the edge, to the dissolution of civilized order into chaos and tyranny. We can feel in our bones the implacable hatred of our would-be commissars for everything we believe is good and right and true — along with a growing understanding that their hatred doesn’t stop at our traditions and beliefs. As long as we live and breathe, we are a threat. If the blood-soaked history of the twentieth century can teach us anything at all, it should teach us that it will not be enough to see us displaced and destroyed. They will want us dead and gone.

One of the milestones along the road to civil war is the normalization of violence as a rational response to a dehumanized enemy, followed soon after by an eagerness for general conflict. This eagerness arises first in the breasts of those seeking radical change, who see violence as justified by the righteousness of their cause, and who are usually young and excitable people who have a much better sense of how to destroy what exists than to build and preserve a system that, however flawed, actually works. (This also reflects that the Right, almost by definition, moves toward order, while the Left is always entropic.) But the Right is eminently capable of reactive, or even proactive, violence when confronted by an existential threat to order, and is every bit as liable to the “othering” and dehumanization of its enemies in preparation for war.

There is, then, a spiral of mutual threat and provocation in the run-up to war, along the course of which a people can go from general comity and commonality, to political or cultural division, to rancorous debate, to increasingly bitter struggle for political power, to “othering” and dehumanization, to normalized violence, to bloodthirsty eagerness for war, to general armed conflict. We are already well into the latter stages, and even on the Right I see martial enthusiasm increasing: the hatred of the enemy, the idea that we are now so far beyond reconciliation that there is going to be a fight, and that we might as well get on with it (especially as we are the ones who will most likely win)…